My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.

Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.

So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.